Dear founder,
I was recently reading an article about The Great British Baking Show - or Bake Off, as we fans of this fun TV competition call it. It was written by someone who had been on the show, one of the competitors, and they were talking about how looking at the show from the inside made them realize something profound: there are no real amateurs anymore.
That observation stopped me in my tracks.
Even the people portrayed as Britains best amateur bakers are, in a way, focused professionals competing on every level, through many stages of pre-competition trials to the eventual baking show finals, with all the self-presentation, ambitious dreams, and lucrative post-competition baking book deals.
It reminded me that we’re living in a world where everybody is on social media, where everybody is presenting themselves in their field. People like Nikita Bier tweet that the best way to stand out is to talk about one particular topic 100,000 times and present yourself as an expert in the field - advice that I’ve given to other people as well. If you want people to believe that you’re an expert, just keep talking about the topic and keep helping people who are on their own path to expertise.
But this reality in which we all get better at what we do is very different from the reality of craftsmen and artisans in the past. And understanding this shift isn’t just philosophical musing - it has real implications for how we build businesses, create products, and establish ourselves in the digital economy.
This is where I want to share a word about our Sponsor, Paddle.com. The way you monetize Software as a Service applications and mobile apps has changed a lot over the last few years as well. Not only is there more competition, but regulations are getting in the way in many places. That’s why I personally chose to charge my customers through a merchant of record, and for me, that’s Paddle. They take care of all the taxes, the currencies, tracking declined transactions and updated credit cards so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors (and not banks and financial regulators). If you think you’d rather just build your product, check out Paddle.com as your payment provider.
The Lost World of Pure Craftsmanship
Think about this for a moment: throughout most of human history, some people were just really good at some particular thing for most of their life, but the only people who knew about it were their closest family members, or the people who happened to live in proximity to them.
The local woodworker would occasionally bring over a really well-worked piece of woodworking. They were good at it. They did it for decades, for half a century, yet they never, ever posted a picture of it on Instagram or tried to turn it into a woodworking Etsy shop or a business.
They just were good at the thing because they enjoyed it.
Never did it feel like they had to present themselves as an expert in that particular activity, even though they were one. Had they had a chance to teach their knowledge to somebody else, they would have empowered somebody to become just as much of an expert as they were. But some people just didn’t. They just did the thing they liked, huddled away in their basements, huddled away in their shops, and that was that.
There was something pure about this. Something authentic. The work was the reward. The craft was the point. There was no audience to perform for, no metrics to chase, no engagement to optimize. Just the simple satisfaction of creating something with your own hands, of getting better at something you loved, of mastering a skill for its own sake.
But that world is largely gone now. And while we might feel nostalgic for it, we need to understand what has replaced it - because that’s the world we’re building businesses in today.
The Attention Competition
In a world of media - social media, or media of any kind - you can’t just be an amateur anymore. Bake Off is traditional media, but YouTube channels where people share their own journeys represent the more novel version of this transformation. You have to be a presenter, a self-presenter, or effectively, a salesman. You’re somebody who is competing with others for attention.
I think that’s the big difference that amateurs never had to cope with in the pre-social media world: attention is now part of the activity. If you want to be an amateur, if you want to pursue a hobby, you’re immediately thrust into this ecosystem where documentation and presentation are as important as the actual skill itself.
Let me give you a personal example from my particular hobby field: miniature painting. I really always enjoyed it - painting miniatures of all kinds for most of my life. It’s meditative, creative, and deeply satisfying. But the landscape of this hobby has completely transformed in the last decade.
The content that is being created for people in this field is now created by people who are both very, very good at what they do - maybe not professionally, they don’t paint miniatures on commission - they’re just really good at doing that. But here’s the thing: they are now looking for sponsors. They are looking for influencer marketing gigs. They’re building Patreons, selling courses, creating exclusive content tiers.
All of a sudden, it’s not about the quality of how well they can paint a tiny little dwarf or an orc, but how they present the process of that paint job. All of a sudden, they need to also be good at camera work and narrative for a 30-minute YouTube video. They need to understand lighting, audio quality, video editing, thumbnail design, SEO, community management, and social media algorithms.
The skillset has exploded. It means that they just cannot be the actual amateur enthusiast that they would be if they didn’t want to - or have to - present their work in the social media context. They’re not just painters anymore; they’re content creators, educators, entertainers, and entrepreneurs all rolled into one.
And this isn’t unique to miniature painting. Look at any hobby, any field, any area of expertise. The woodworkers are on YouTube. The knitters are on Instagram. The home cooks are on TikTok. Everyone is performing their expertise, not just practicing it.
The Pressure to Perform Excellence
What’s particularly interesting - and somewhat troubling - is how this has raised the bar for what constitutes acceptable amateur work. When you’re constantly exposed to the best of the best on social media, when algorithms surface only the most engaging, most polished content, your own humble efforts can feel inadequate by comparison.
The person who used to be perfectly happy with their Sunday painting sessions now feels pressure to document their process, to have good lighting, to create time-lapses, to explain their techniques. The joy of simple creation gets complicated by the anxiety of presentation.
And here’s where it gets really complex: very few people watch people who are worse than they are at the thing they want to be better at. So you have to reach a pretty high level of competence yet still feel relatable and approachable for people to start forging a relationship with you. You need to be aspirational but accessible, expert but empathetic, polished but personable.
It’s an impossible tightrope to walk, and yet thousands of people are attempting it every day across every conceivable niche and hobby.
Two Critical Lessons for Entrepreneurs
I’m sharing this for two reasons, and both are important for entrepreneurs and founders navigating this new landscape.
Lesson One: Building Your Personal Brand in the Performance Economy
If you’re going to build anything, if you want to build a personal brand in any field, you have to be aware that just being good at the thing is not sufficient anymore. Just being technically capable - be that a good painter, a good musician, a good software developer, a good writer, anything you can become better at - is not enough.
You also have to be capable of communicating this well to people who are on similar journeys. You have to be an empathetic and relatable person. You need to understand not just your craft, but how to teach it, how to inspire others, how to build community around it.
Think about the most successful people in any field today. They’re not necessarily the absolute best at their craft - they’re the ones who are very good at their craft AND excellent at communicating about it. They can break down complex ideas into digestible content. They can turn their process into compelling narratives. They can make their expertise accessible to others.
This is why you see so many founders building in public now. It’s not enough to build a great product; you need to document the journey. It’s not enough to have expertise; you need to share it constantly. The work itself has become inseparable from the performance of the work.
Lesson Two: Building Products for the Self-Documenting Semi-Professional
On the other side, if you look at this as a founder of a software as a service business, or any kind of software-enabled digital business, you need to understand that your users are living in this reality too. Not only are you going to have to help people become better at what they do, you also have to consider that if you are selling to a group of enthusiastic amateurs or semi-professionals, you don’t just have to solve their primary problem well.
You should think about how you can facilitate for them to communicate what they are doing and show what they are doing to others. This is something really new, and it’s something that I haven’t seen in many spaces other than community-centric businesses that have understood this already.
Your users don’t just want to accomplish tasks - they want to share their accomplishments. They don’t just want to improve - they want to document their improvement. They don’t just want to succeed - they want to celebrate their success publicly.
The Documentation Imperative: “Screenshot or It Didn’t Happen”
There was a meme when I was growing up around claims on the internet: “Screenshot or it didn’t happen.” In a way, that was an early version of proof being in the documentation, being in the visual representation of the thing you’re doing. It’s not just that people trust you to have done the thing - you have to be able to show it in memeable formats.
This has evolved into something much more sophisticated now. It’s not just about proof; it’s about narrative, about building your story in public, about creating a documented journey that others can follow and learn from.
A lot of the products that I see doing this really well have understood that if an accomplishment happens within a product, they need to facilitate sharing it. Let me give you a concrete example: One of the software tools I use is called DaisyDisk, which scans my hard drive for files and shows me which I can delete. Whenever I’ve deleted a certain number of gigabytes, it prompts me to post about it on Twitter. Now I don’t always do it, but I like the idea.
The idea is brilliant: hey, you’ve just accomplished something - you’ve cleaned up your disk, something that many people want to do but don’t find the time to. You can share this achievement. It’s getting people at the point where something that people aspire to do happens for you, and then it allows you to share it.
Think about all the successful products that have built-in sharing mechanisms:
- Strava for runners and cyclists
- Duolingo with its streak counters
- GitHub with its contribution graphs
- Spotify Wrapped at the end of each year
These aren’t just features; they’re recognition that users want to perform their progress, to make their private achievements public, to turn their personal development into social content.
Building for the Documentation Age
We have to think about the decline of the pure amateur and the increased presence of the self-documenting semi-professional in how we design our products and services. As entrepreneurs, we can help people navigate this new reality, because that is just what being a person in the times of social media is about. It’s doing things and talking about things, and talking about things and then doing them. It’s that constant cycle of self-documentation.
We can help facilitate that in many ways that we might not yet do. The products and the offerings and the services that help people self-document - either internally through journaling or reporting, or externally through posting and documenting on social media - are going to be increasingly valuable.
Think about it: the MRR screenshots that founders share, the customer service conversations with the names blurred out, the before-and-after transformations, the progress bars, the milestone celebrations - all of this is something we can facilitate, because it’s part of somebody’s journey that they would like to communicate.
Because that’s just how we do journeys now. We don’t just go on them; we document them. We don’t just learn; we teach what we’re learning. We don’t just improve; we inspire others to improve.
The Double-Edged Sword of Public Performance
Now, I want to be clear: this isn’t entirely negative. There are real benefits to this shift. The democratization of expertise means that knowledge that was once locked away in guilds or passed down through apprenticeships is now freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The barrier to learning almost any skill has never been lower.
The social pressure to document and share has also created accountability mechanisms that can actually help people improve faster. When you know you’re going to share your progress, you’re more likely to make progress. When you’re teaching others, you learn more deeply yourself.
But we also need to acknowledge what we’ve lost. The simple joy of doing something just because you enjoy it, without any thought of how it will look on Instagram. The freedom to be mediocre at something without feeling ashamed. The ability to have private hobbies, secret skills, personal satisfactions that aren’t performed for an audience.
Practical Implications for Founders
So what does this mean practically for those of us building businesses in this new reality?
First, we need to recognize that our users are not just users - they’re performers. They’re not just solving problems; they’re creating content about solving problems. They’re not just achieving goals; they’re documenting their achievements.
This means we should be thinking about:
- How can we make our users look good?
- How can we help them tell their story?
- How can we facilitate their self-presentation?
- How can we make their achievements shareable?
- How can we help them build their own audiences?
Second, we need to understand that the value we provide isn’t just functional - it’s social. People don’t just want tools that work; they want tools that make them look like they’re working. They don’t just want to be productive; they want to appear productive.
This isn’t about being cynical or manipulative. It’s about understanding the reality of how people live and work today. The performance is part of the job now, whether we like it or not.
The Future of Amateur Expertise
Looking forward, I don’t see this trend reversing. If anything, it’s accelerating. As more of our lives move online, as remote work becomes more common, as AI tools make content creation easier, the pressure to perform our expertise will only increase.
The pure amateur - the person who pursues a craft solely for personal satisfaction without any thought of audience or documentation - is becoming an endangered species. In their place, we have a new breed of practitioners: the performer-practitioner, the creator-craftsperson, the influencer-expert.
This isn’t necessarily better or worse than what came before - it’s just different. And as founders and entrepreneurs, we need to understand this shift if we want to build products and services that truly serve people’s needs in this new reality.
Conclusion: Embracing the Performance
I think we could definitely make this part of our mission: to not just empower our users to get their jobs done, but to also show - to whoever they want to show their progress to - just how much they get done.
The craftsman in the basement has been replaced by the creator with a camera. The amateur tinkering in the garage has become the YouTuber with a workshop studio. The hobbyist has become the content creator. And our job, as entrepreneurs, is to help them navigate this new reality.
We can mourn the loss of the pure amateur, the person who did things just for the joy of doing them. But we also need to recognize and serve the new reality: a world where doing and showing are inseparable, where practice and performance are one and the same, where every amateur is also an influencer in waiting.
The question isn’t whether this is good or bad - it’s how we can build products and services that help people thrive in this new reality. How can we make the performance easier? How can we make the documentation seamless? How can we help people share their journeys in ways that feel authentic and sustainable?
Because at the end of the day, that’s what being a person in the age of social media is about. It’s not just about being good at something - it’s about being good at sharing that you’re good at something. And if we can help people do both, we’re creating real value in this new economy of performed expertise.
The pure amateur may be dead, but in their place, we have millions of people sharing their knowledge, documenting their journeys, and inspiring others to follow in their footsteps. And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad trade-off after all.
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